Queen opens Science Museum gallery, sends her first tweet

She appeared at The Science Museum to open an exhibition entitled The Information Age

. She used a tablet to send the tweet from her official twitter account @BritishMonarchy.

It reads: “It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.”

She had just toured the £15.6 million exhibition before sending the tweet.

The exhibition has been three years in the planning and charts the history of modern communications from the telegraph to the smartphone. Exhibits include the first transatlantic telegraph cable which connected Europe and North America, the broadcast equipment used by the BBC for its first radio program in 1922, and inventor of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXt computer.

Of course, this being The Science Museum, there’s plenty of interaction too. Visitors are invited to make a 1980s mobile phone network, find out exactly what happens when you click a link, and listen in on what goes on in a 1950s telephone exchange.

“We really want [visitors] to see that our predecessors lived through similar periods of change,” the gallery’s chief curator Tilly Blyth said. “Ours isn’t the only revolution – just the latest in a series of transformations since the electric telegraph in the 1830s.”

Baroness Martha Lane Fox described the gallery as “an amazing opportunity for people young and old to come and see the extraordinary developments in technology over the last hundred years or so.”